Epistemology

What does it mean to know? I am not a philosophy teacher. Nor do I yet have the necessary reading required to tackle such a question if any serious and credible answer is to be given. What then, is my business attempting to answer it prematurely? One thing I have found to be very helpful in my learning process is that proper and genuine deliberation on a question that you wish to obtain an answer to, the more it stretches the thinker’s ability, has a great effect on the integration of any future material that would serve to help the cause, as it increases the level of engagement of the reader since whatever he wrote before would serve as a basis upon which he could bridge a dialogue with the author. This assures adequate and lasting incorporation of knowledge granted there is sincerity. Here, is the reason for my meddling, to thoroughly seek out all the cogent answers you could give, and their ramifications, as well as reasonable counter-examples and possible objections to them. I hope to do it justice, as such an undertaking tends to be lengthy and work-intensive–at least internally–in order to not let any negligence get the better of me.

Returning to the question, some other indagations come to mind. Namely, what would constitute as knowledge? Or, given knowledge, how does it structure itself in the human mind? Are there different types of knowledge? Do these order themselves amongst each other? If so, how do they order themselves? In a genus species kind of way, such that, there would be a most basic level of knowledge upon which all further knowledge would obtain its essential status? What are the parameters that make it what it is? Regardless, there must be some unitive aspect among all the particular instances of knowledge, an essential characteristic that could be searched out through a definition, lest we would not be able to call knowledge, knowledge.

What does knowing entail? A good first response to that question would be in trying to find the most basic, most simple phenomenon to which it could be reduced as a necessary condition to knowledge, but not necessarily sufficient though. It seems to me that the most basic shared characteristic of all knowledge is awareness. One could not be said to know something if he is not aware of it. However that immediately brings to mind: do animals, with regards to their instincts know how to perform them? And if they do, are they aware of it? Is a newborn calf aware of its hunger, and need for milk? If the answer is yes, then instinctual processes would count as knowledge. Therefore insofar as instinct is defined as inherent patterns of behavior in response to certain stimuli, such as aversion to pain or the appetition of pleasure (implying a movement away from or towards), we can affirm a basis for a distinction between inherent and acquired knowledge. Now, one could very well answer that instinct does not constitute as knowledge and that instinct–if he maintains that knowledge is a fruit of awareness– far from having any relationship with awareness is involuntary, that we are not aware of how we do involuntary responses, we only know that we do them, thus this would have acquired knowledge be the only kind of knowledge so far. I believe this is an erroneous position as we are not dealing with instincts as biological processes, in which, under the umbrella of the involuntary, we would classify it. This eliminates all agency from the subject; instinct, having behavior and action as inherent to it, needs agency; especially in terms of human beings who are able to–in greater or lesser degrees–have control over their instincts. In what concerns action, we are aware of it and know how to act. knowing something implies knowing how to do it. if you don’t know how to do it, then you can’t really do it; you might–as a fluke–do it at one time, but then, at another, not pull it off. If, for example, I don’t know how to draw, I might fluke a proportionate drawing, but it will most certainly not be a consistent outcome. Despite all of this, there is yet a third position. A position that denies the first premise as having awareness be a necessary cause of knowledge. This position could quite possibly collapse knowledge into inanimate subjects as well as animate ones, decomposing knowledge into mere facts. Such a thing would deny the existence of someone who knows, negating the possibility of knowledge, which, lest one refrain from making any propositions, is self-contradictory.

There is another ramification in taking awareness as precondition to knowlegde, that is, a metacognizing of sorts. A process whereby there is the self-recognition of any act or happening, the subject agknowledges to himself the effective existence of being, he becomes knower of the known. This implies agency. What does that mean? As long as knowledge deals with awareness, having consciousness as one of its primary causes, it implies a subject who is conscious, who is aware. Knowledge can only be insofar as it is known by something conscious. There is no knowledge if there is no consciousness, therefore it is a product of consciousness. This also means that inanimate objects cannot have knowledge. Conscious awareness, however, is a necessary but not sufficient cause of knowledge if you believe in an external world. The argument is thus: just as a knife cannot cut itself, a foot cannot step on itself, fire cannot burn itself, so awareness cannot be aware of itself as such (I say “as such” because one might object with metacognition. I’m not up to par on the latest academic research on the subject, that is to say, I’m no expert or well-read here, but from what I understand of it, under this argument you could simply affirm that a person is aware of his experience as a human and reflects on it with the aid of memory and reason. So awareness would not be aware of itself immediately but only mediately). To know then, there must be something to know, evidently; following from this, there is the necessity of something external to consciousness to be known which was not known before. Would this mean that knowledge exists outside of consciousness? No. Knowledge is the product of an act, the act of knowing. In this sense, it is, as opposed to an individual thing, a relationship resultant from the knower and the known. What are the axes of evaluation for this relationship? Perhaps some such as temporal, qualitative, and quantitative would be reasonable to propose, but before that, I’d like to return to the distinction mentioned above.

Inherent and acquired knowledge. Inherent knowledge is inborn, acquired in our coming to be, without our awareness. In other words, we are aware of our instincts and know how to execute them, but we were not aware in acquiring them, nor is it proper to say that such knowledge is acquired. This kind of knowledge takes on an ontological status, differently from acquired knowledge. Some examples of this are instincts (hunger, reproduction, self-preservation); notions of good and bad (desire, and the motion of the body toward or away from something); emotions such as fear, anger, happiness, humor and their association to good and bad; our ability to reason (to use reason is inherent to humans). But it doesn’t seem to me they become a part of knowledge until the subject becomes aware of them. In the realm of acquired knowledge, we can start by taking it at its most basic level irrespective of truth value or any other distinction. Defining it as anything that comes into your field of awareness to the point of recognition. It can be true or false, regardless, it is incorporated as the most basic level, knowledge as divorced from truth or falsity. Proceeding, we can reach The second level where truth-value becomes relevant. When you know something and when it is in fact true, you have reached this second level; which, clearly, is higher than the former. In this level you would be striving to make true statements through judgements, they, however, can be true or false, and thus could resumed to a mere placement of belief about the being or non-being of something.

The stated above brings about an issue concerning belief and truth. What is belief? Belief implies not a simple concept, but a compound one in that it is defined in function of a proposition whose veracity comes into question. In other words, it requires an agent to affirm his belief in something. Thus, in reaching the second level of knowledge where a known thing may be true or false, one must make a judgement on whether it is one or the other based on conscious or unconscious, implicit presuppositions. Is belief an act of the will? Do you will yourself to believe in something? One might say that affirming something requires you to be willing to affirm it in the first place; but this presupposes something further back, namely, why would you be willing to affirm it? if something is false and someone is unwilling to affirm it then that means either, he is unwilling to affirm anything, or that he is willing to affirm true things. Out of this we can derive that people who affirm true and false things equally, are willing to affirm both and therefore do not value truth and have not made a decision to follow truth. Hence, the will does not localize itself in belief or judgement but in what is implicit in it, values and truth. Because, verily the will cannot take action outside or irrespective of truth. In order for action to be effective, to work, it must act on true things. You cannot act upon that which does not exist. Even the concept of will and action themselves are presupposed to exist, to be true. Because, under certain definitions of existence, only true things actually exist, and accordingly, they are the only objects of operation. The coincidence of the subject’s values with truth, would give birth to knowledge. For if otherwise, he valued not truth, even if he had it he would be looking not at it, but at that which he valued, not recognizing it at all: how could he have knowledge?

In light of all of this, how would you know where to place your belief? Anyone can reach the second level of knowledge through some fluke, but that would be not to his own merit. He can utter a true proposition and know the proposition, but if he does not know how he arrived at that truth or how it is true, why it is true, what is truth, what are its laws, and that something has to be in agreement with its laws to be true else it would be false then he only has knowledge of the thing as such in addition to unsubstantiated belief, not the truth of it (side note: it seems to me that truth should not be attributed to belief per se, but only to propositions and their justifications, under this framework, there is but rightly or wrongly-placed belief inasmuch as what one knows and its justifications are in accord with truth). Consequently, we must first answer all of these questions if we are to proceed.

I believe this to be a good place to stop the inquiry for now.